Single hacker could be responsible for Wiki DDOS

A single hacker could be behind the DDoS attacks that took down Wikileaks as it published secret US embassy cables over the weekend.

Going by the name of Jester (or th3j35t3r on Twitter), the hacker describes himself as a "hacktivist for good" and posts the message "TANGO DOWN" after a successful attack, together with a link of the sites he takes down.

In his Twitter bio he says the focus of his attacks, is "obstructing the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathisers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and other general bad guys".

Jester hasn't outright admitted to being the culprit of the attacks but a couple of messages on his feed point the finger to him. Recently, a couple of messages pointing to Wikileaks have appeared on Jester's Twitter account.

The most recent of them read " Protected content - TANGO DOWN - for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, 'other assets' & foreign relations #wikileaks #fail." He then added "If I was a wikileaks 'source' right now I'd be getting a little twitchy, if they cant protect their own site, how can they protect a src?"

According to Mashable he also referenced his intentions way back in September in his blog, where he described the flaws of Wikileaks' "insurance policy," which consists of making available an encrypted file, supposedly containing the secret documents that were leaked afterwards.According to Jester the file is useless without a decryption key, which would be provided by Wikileaks in case someone takes the site down.Although Jester appears a capable hacker, it's not entirely known if he did this on his own. When Wikileaks handed out information on the Iraq war in October , both US officials and press called for a direct attack on the file-leaking organisation under the pretext of national security.

At the time a security expert told TechEye an attack would be "behind the scenes", not direct.

"The government would not be rash, or naïve, enough to launch a direct attack now, it would be much more likely to come behind the scenes. All it does is attract publicity to WikiLeaks and lend credence to other questionable conspiracy theories that may arise on the site."

Our source stated that a "behind the scenes attack" would be more likely, with sympathetic parties potentially attempting to protect their own interests with offensive action against the site.